Sunday, February 14, 2016

American by Birth, Socialist by Force, Southern by the Grace of God

OK. Another long title. Why save for the body of the actual piece what you can squeeze into the title? That's a rhetorical question.

Here's the deal with insurance. You are a lawbreaker if you don't have it. If you can't afford it, you then are required to take the one paid for by everyone else. It just doesn't seem right.

Then someone tells me that you can get a regular check of some kind from sociable security. They say, "You paid in!" I say I did not pay that much, and I tend to wish I could distance myself from so much government oversight and intrusion into my life. Some people like it. I detest the whole culture, language, and attitude of most social agencies. Most all official authoritarian agencies and entities creep me out.

But there is not much escape. The system may give rise to lost souls, poverty and pain, but the average person seems to be all for it, and some people do better this way. Or they seem to. Probably people who like to talk about what "we" should do about obesity and the like. Or those who discuss the fine points of how "our" children are "our" greatest resource. Even if they have no offspring.

I get it more than ever than humans build upon what others have done, and are best served through cooperative effort and trade. I just don't leap into forced communal bliss as the logical, best way to make us all happy.

Be that as it may. If my medical status progresses at all, then someone other than me would end up paying big bucks for the next drugs. Presently what is working is pretty cheap. Many people with this condition either progress to the next stage of myeloproliferative neoplasm or require additional or different drugs to try to stabilize levels of various types of cells, or slow production of poorly made cells. Those next drug types cost a fortune.

One of them is roughly $9200 for a month's supply, and the other common one is 3700 for 4 injections. Not sure the frequency of injection but it is frequent enough to make it an expensive bet. In those cases you have one rate if you do it yourself and one for the doctor's office; until you wrestle the system and get some sane deal worked out, according to many who have been that route.

Many people go on for years without graduating to the big trouble making stage. I am likely to do OK.

The point is, if I did need the other stuff and decided not to just give up or to cure myself with shamans and peyote, my good and kind countrymen would be paying out the nose to allegedly keep me alive. I may let them, but not without plenty of guilt. In reality, and in my mind, medical treatment and being supplied with manufactured drugs is not a right. It is nice but absolutely not a natural right. A true right does not require others to do things like go to medical school, get up early and be at the office to serve me, etc. Not a right. Nice that such care is available but not truly the job of others to supply me with those services since I am a loser.

I'm becoming enough of a misanthrope to allow it, though. I still think it is a combination of overbearing authority and corrupt cronyism and more factors which put us in this fix. The narcissistic face of government tends to bleed people dry of energy and resources. It is a big picture issue and most of the world is made up of grubby people who cannot see past stealing your shoes because they want them. How that plays out, long term, is not examined.